This would have been Mother's Day thoughts, but we had a mother of all storms in Texas Sunday which knocked out the power until late that night. So, Monday was spent catching up on all kinds of stuff like picking up broken tree branches, etc.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher: "A mother is not a person to lean on but a person to make leaning unnecessary."

Pearl Buck: "Some are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same, and most mothers kiss and scold together."

Nancy Friday: "When I stopped seeing my mother with the eyes of a child, I started seeing the woman who helped me give birth to myself."

Sam Levinson (needed a man's perspective because he's right!): "Insanity is hereditary. You get it from your children."

Just read an interesting article complete with statistics about how many Americans read. Folks, the news isn't good. I guess it's not surprising that reading has fallen in favor as entertainment. What is surprising is what it said about blogs.

We denizens of the net think everyone surfs from blog to blog, but apparently that's not true. According to the study done by the American Library Association, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Pew Internet and American Life Project, only 27% of Americans with internet access read blogs. Compare this to the percentage of American internet users who don't know what a blog is--62%. Whoa.

Just thought I'd pass on a tip for those who are blog-addicted. If you surf to several blogs regularly, there's an easy way to navigate to them only when they've posted something new.

Set up a Kinja account--it's free--and make a digest of the blogs you like. Then you can just click on your Kinja account. If there's a new blog entry for the respective blogs, you're notified. That way you don't have to go blog to blog to blog every day to stay on top of the entries.

This morning when I was exercising, I had the TV on. Flipped channels a few times and settled on a design show on Fox. Think it was called Live Like a Star. The design segment segued into a makeover segment. A young woman wanted to be made over to look like Jessica Simpson because she idolized JS and so did her boyfriend who thought JS was the epitome of beauty I guess. Apparently, this is a daily part of this particular show. They colored her hair, changed her makeup, dressed her--all to be a mirror image of JS.

I found this disturbing. Why are some women so insecure in their own skins? Why isn't the way she looked--as herself--not enough for her or for her boyfriend in her opinion? There's nothing wrong with improving oneself via a new hair style, makeup, clothes, exercise program. Whatever. But why recast yourself as an imitation of someone else? And to do it for a man?!! Don't get me started.

This above all: to thine own self be true,And it must follow, as the night the day,Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Yeah, I can quote Shakespeare with the best of them.

But the bottom line is, be honest. Be yourself. Be happy with who you are. If you can't accept yourself, then how can someone else accept you--the real you?

Another quote, the old Billy Joel song: don't go changing, trying to please me....I love you just the way you are. Those eight words, said with honesty, are about the most powerful, romantic thing a man can say to a woman.

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Even though my name is not Paige Turner, I'm a NY Times and USA Today bestselling author of Contemporary Romance. You can find my books in audio, ebook, and print with several of my romances in French from MILADY Romance (Bragelonne), my French publisher. I live my happily ever after in Texas with my hero, my husband.

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